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- 2023: Books on FX & what's ahead in YA TV
2023: Books on FX & what's ahead in YA TV
Gina Chen
January 18, 2023
Publishers Weekly - UTA buys Fletcher & CompanyUnited Talent Agency, Hollywood’s third largest talent business, continues its investment into literary and writing talent with another literary agency acquisition—they acquired Curtis Brown last summer. UTA was also the first agency to sign the 2020 franchise agreement with the Writers Guild of America, the first of the four majors to concede to the union's demand to evolve project packaging structures.
Deadline - 'Bannerman' Spy Books in Works for Television at AMC Networks from Shane Black, Greg Nicotero & Brian WittenI try to focus on projects in production or about to be released, but there are some that just seem like sure bets based on whose involved. Between the network, the collaborators, subject, and audience, John Maxim’s Bannerman series appears poised for small screen success. AMC has been quietly killing it when it comes to high-end espionage and intrigue, particularly with its John le Carré adaptations, The Night Manager and The Little Drummer Girl; the biggest obstacle actually seems to be if the business will be able to properly support the project when the time comes.
When head of FX John Landgraf articulates to New York Magazine's Josef Adalian that the network is "like HBO... trying to make a particular kind of programming for people who like programming that is more original, more adult, more edgy,” a similar assertion from former HBO head Michael Fuchs in It’s Not TV instantly pinged in my head: “I wanted us to be more candid, more open, more fresh, more experimental, more daring than the networks, who were, to me, homogenized.” But beyond programming, both Landgraf in the rest of the interview and executives in various HBO histories emphasize the evolving technological and economic ecosystems that allow for the delivery of innovative programming to consumers.
Separate from macro industry observations, Landgraf discusses the messy operation of not exactly merging with Hulu, which may or may not have contributed to some of the mixed-to-muted reception for some buzzy adaptations of the last few years: Y: The Last Man, based on the celebrated comic, was summarily axed after an arduous journey through development and production; The Old Man, based on the 2017 Thomas Perry novel, has got a second chance to recoup its early fans after its warm reception dropped off halfway through the season; and Kindred, inspired by Octavia Butler’s masterpiece, is still awaiting news of renewal or cancellation despite being developed as a multi-season adaptation. One could argue that there were two outright successes: Under the Banner of Heaven, I thought, was a marvelously engrossing adaptation of the Krakauer book, but got lost in the awards season shuffle; timing-wise, Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s adaptation of her novel Fleishman Is In Trouble was able to hold its own for accolades and attention over the holiday season, but scheduling it so far off from the spring means a lot of work to be done then for voters to remember it.
Perhaps 2023 will be better?
I’m most excited for the return of TV’s best cowboy hat-wearing actor, Timothy Olyphant, for the Justified “extension” limited series called Justified: City Primeval, based on the Elmore Leonard novel City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit. I greatly enjoyed reading the book while in Detroit, visiting family, and my only quibble with the project is that the production was filmed in Chicago. (I lie: my second quibble is that Walton Goggins does not return). The original drama, which debuted on cable in 2010, was based on Leonard’s stories about the deputy U.S. marshal Raylan Givens, and is one of the best book-to-TV adaptations in how it honored and expanded the universe, narratives, and characters of origin.
Objectively buzzier for the balance sheet: the highly-anticipated remake of Shōgun, based on the 1975 James Clavell novel and the groundbreaking, award-winning 1980 NBC miniseries that starred Toshiro Mifune (Rashomon) and was narrated by Orson Welles. The 1980 series, which aired on NBC, clocked over 23 million households tuning in; it had been, as a Dell book, already an extraordinarily-performing bestseller for a 535,000-word novel. No doubt that Blackstone Publishing, which now publishes The Asian Saga (truly, a terrible series moniker), hopes for a redux. The 2023 limited series stars Hiroyuki Sanada (Westworld, John Wick: Chapter 4).
The previous iteration of Shōgun:
➞ +23 million household viewers each night for 5 nights in September 1980 ➞ 32 weeks on the 1975 NYT bestseller list for the debut hardcover ➞ +10,000 hardcover units annually from 1975-1980
➞ +3.5 million paperback copies sold from 1976-August 1980
➞ +2.1 million mass market paperbacks sold in September-October 1980, the months after the huge premiere on NBC
Last bits and bites of FX updates from the TCA beat: there’s the BBC co-production of Great Expectations starring Olivia Colman as Miss Havisham, developed by Steven Knight (Eastern Promises, Locke); as well as a star-studded podcast adaptation, Sterling Affairs, building on the reporting of Ramona Shelburne on the downfall of LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling for ESPN’s 30 for 30. Patrick Radden Keefe’s Troubles report, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, continues to be in development; and it seems quite likely, from all the casting announced, that the TV adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go will film this year—there was a 2010 film adaptation that starred Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, and Andrew Garfield, and was written by Alex Garland (Annihilation, Ex Machina).
Who’s driving the bus(iness) of this major paper-printing book-to-TV franchise? It’s no longer the original publisher or author, though they continue to enjoy the boons and bon mots.
This TV mega-producer had a pretty free-range conversation with a major industry outlet, but not all discussed was ultimately shared as the pieces were quietly sent to digital pasture over the recent holidays.
Have a hard time envisioning comics or graphic novels into a single screen format? If you’re reading on Kindle, double tap to shift to Guided View, which auto-crops and zooms into each frame or panel for closer reading, transforming the illustrations into a single panel storyboard you can flip through.
It’s an inelegant but handy shortcut—you lose a lot of what’s unique to the page framing the illustrators and design teams have developed, but the makeshift blinkers focus your attention to each action or dialogue exchange and can help isolate what parts must stay in from iteration to iteration in development and adaptation.
I'm of the opinion that Netflix's Heartstopper, visually and narratively, hews a little too closely to its source material, but for the YA set, this plays off particularly well—there's no hierarchy in which format is "better," because the adherence to author and illustrator Alice Oseman's vision is so clear and preserved in the adaptation. Whether you come to the story first from the original webcomics, the books, or the television show, the mirroring of story and style in how favorite moments are depicted is preserved as fans re-experience through another medium. (Oseman wrote all the scripts for the first season and served as executive producer for the show).
While Hallmark Publishing closed at the end of last year, Hallmark Channel remains one of the strongest cable networks during the holiday season and one of the most prolific in releasing seasonal films. This dissection of costumes provides a great structure for a romance novel or screenplay.
More helpful tips, whether you’re reading books or scripts for a living.
Several lovely people have reached out to me about HarperCollins, but the long and short of things is that I was part of the wave of layoffs last year to trim the fat off operational expenses by way of managing salary costs. If anyone’s in need of a brand expert, project manager, or creative strategist, please reach out! [email protected]
Meanwhile, the HarperCollins Union is standing strong and are going into the 50s for number of days on general strike. Anne Helen Petersen’s conversation above with union leader and associate editor Rachel Kambury digs into what the union has been asking for and what HarperCollins is objecting to.
It’s actually quite modest, and one of the union’s main concerns—raising the salary floor for entry-level employees 11% or $5000, from $45K a year to $50K for 200 roles—accounts for only $1M in annual salary costs. In contrast, HarperCollins alone generated record profits last fiscal year at $2.19B, and while summer sales were down, somehow the larger company of News Corp. has enough cash to fund $1 billion in stock buybacks in the last year alone.
Better books > buybacks!
I’ll be at the demonstration today, Wednesday January 18, outside the News Corp. offices with my former colleagues. If you can’t join us in person, you can support the Union and my colleagues directly by donating to their strike fund.
I’ve been in a viewing funk lately, and found myself watching a bunch of YA/teen dystopia movies I steered clear of a decade ago, fare like The Maze Runner and Divergent and The Hunger Games. The latter is getting a big revival this year, with the prequel movie The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, and no doubt, folks are looking to both big box office and backlist returns, and crossing their fingers that Gen Z might take to the genre for another teen boom.
I don’t think that’s likely to happen, if only because the last decade has demonstrated how dystopian our current, real world actually is. The ecological and political chaos that looms over the futures of maturing teens is much more daunting than the fantastical descriptions in most YA books. The stories that resonate for the most technologically-sophisticated and message-inundated generation yet will be the ones around determining who and what is worth listening to—the challenges of dis- and misinformation, identity-inspired propaganda, and developing the confidence to be their own selves.
These are timeless themes that were present in previous generations of teen video fare, but decidedly not reliant on the overtly oppressive trappings of child murder—again, there’s sadly too much of that happening in real life, and they don’t want to see that necessarily on screen—or at least, not in the ways it’s been presented in the past. (Bashirat Oladele wrote incisively about the end of the YA dystopia craze last year for Polygon). In the next decade, the most successful projects will have a balance of sincerity, optimistic cynicism, and joyful absurdity.
You’re already starting to see this on the small screen, particularly with the Netflix shows that actually are hits with teens/tweens/young adults: Sex Education, Heartstopper, Wednesday, and even arguably, Outer Banks. At one point, one could argue that Riverdale and Glee had what I’m talking about when I mean sincerity—emotional sincerity—but at a certain point, camp, melodrama, and mystery can tip the scales of balance. It becomes less fun and real to engage with the characters as they literally get lost in the plot, and the necessary survival and political mechanics of dystopia stories mean that it’s all the easier to fall into the trap of failing to evolve the characters.
I have mixed feelings about the BBC-HBO adaptation of His Dark Materials, which just concluded, but the show landed the emotional plane while executing some of the most complicated maneuvers of ecclesiastics, parallel universes, and dualism ever pitched to teens through Philip Pullman’s iconic trilogy. It’s the kind of show that will, in a few years, have a pop on Tumblr as people “rediscover” it now that the adaptation has concluded, and it will have a long tail of positive regard, similar to the books. The density of the subjects and the continuation of the story through the next trilogy, The Book of Dust, is also great strategic positioning for playing the long game; theology-inspired fantasy is a bit too specific to catch on in an immediate, big way for viewers at large, but there are so many entry points into the story between the books and the TV show (and the stage play and the 2007 film) that it’s a dark horse of how to have a modestly successful adaptation.
If you've made it this far, thank you for wading through! What did you enjoy? What surprised you? What would you like to learn more of or to read in the future?
I'll be releasing some combination of curated articles, collected lists, and analysis from my decade of working across TV & publishing, and on a monthly basis, Q&As, industry interviews, and a calendar of what adaptations are getting released on the small screen.
If you enjoyed or found this useful, please share with a friend or colleague. And please, I'd love to get your feedback! DM me via @trundlings or email me directly at [email protected].
Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. To view all the books mentioned in this email on a single page, please visit this issue's list on Bookshop here, Newsletter Mentions: January 18, 2023.